To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and choir—­exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately Gothic style.  Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints and martyrs worked in tarsia for the choir-stalls.  His frescoes are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of partial decay.  Borgognone’s oil pictures throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty.  He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity.  His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion is transfigured by habitual calm.  The brown and golden harmonies he loved, are gained without sacrifice of lustre:  there is a self-restraint in his colouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately sought if not consummately attained.  In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombard of the best time.  The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeats in colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone—­a sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity.  This brusqueness was the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancy in these northern artists.  Of all Borgognone’s pictures in the Certosa I should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S. Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master’s qualities.

The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship.  From Borgognone’s majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini’s Christian grace, or mark the influence of Lionardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by his pupil, Andrea Solari.  Like everything touched by the Lionardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished:  yet Northern Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendant Mother of Heaven.  The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters—­et tacitos sine labe laous sine murmure rivos—­and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino.